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National Archives Says Records Were Wrongly Classified

WASHINGTON, April 26 — An audit by the National Archives of more than 25,000 historical documents withdrawn from public access since 1999 found that more than a third did not contain sensitive information justifying classification, archives officials announced Wednesday.

They said the removal of the remaining two-thirds was technically justified, though many had already been published or contained old secrets with little practical import.

Even withdrawing those documents that included truly significant secrets may have done more harm than good by calling new attention to the sensitivity of records that researchers had read and photocopied for years, the officials said.

"The irony is that some of these reviews have actually exacerbated any possible damage to national security," said J. William Leonard, head of the archives' Information Security Oversight Office and the government's overseer of classification of records.

Calling the exposure of the hidden effort to reclassify records a "turning-point moment," Allen Weinstein, the head of the National Archives, announced a new effort to set consistent standards for deciding what records should be protected.

The pilot National Declassification Initiative, overseen by the archives, will seek to reduce what Mr. Weinstein called an "unconscionable backlog" of historical records not yet released and to avoid unnecessary classification in the future.

"We're in the access business, not the classification business," Mr. Weinstein said. He said all the agencies that had withdrawn records, including the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, had agreed to drop the practice of secretly reclassifying documents and to operate under new standards of transparency.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said the reclassification of documents had been necessary because other agencies had released C.I.A. intelligence without allowing the spy agency to review it.

"Once classified material is made accessible to the public, there are few good options to protect that information," Mr. Gimigliano said Wednesday. "That said, the C.I.A. has worked very closely with the archives to improve the process and ensure that the public has maximum access to properly declassified records."

Photo

J. William Leonard, left, and Allen Weinstein of the National Archives discussed reclassification Wednesday.Credit
Andrew Cutraro for The New York Times

In announcing the results of the audit, both Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Leonard said it raised unsettling questions about the overall quality of decisions by the three million Americans who hold security clearances about what should be secret. "To be effective, the classification process is a tool that must be wielded with precision," Mr. Leonard said.

The audit found that 25,315 documents were withdrawn from public access, far more than the 9,000 they estimated in February, and that 64 percent met the minimal criteria for classification. The Air Force was responsible for the largest share — 17,702 — followed by the C.I.A., the Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the presidential libraries, which are part of the National Archives system.

The auditors discovered that C.I.A. reviewers deliberately classified some "purely unclassified" documents simply to obscure the removal of other documents they judged to be genuinely sensitive. In addition, the audit showed, some records that had always been unclassified were classified by C.I.A. reviewers — "often 50 years later" — because they contained a name of a C.I.A. official who had received a copy.

At the same time, the audit noted that more than one billion pages of previously secret government documents have been declassified since 1995, four times more than in the 15 years before that. It praised the C.I.A. for placing millions of pages of documents into a searchable computer system that is accessible to researchers at the archives.

The reclassification of documents began after some agencies found that their records had been improperly declassified in the mid-1990's in a process the audit admitted was "replete with errors." The review took place largely hidden from public view, and researchers found entire boxes of records missing from the shelves with only vague notations about "restricted status" as an explanation.

A few months ago, a number of historians led by Matthew M. Aid, a Washington writer on intelligence, discovered that documents they had copied at the archives long ago had been removed. In February, they confronted archives officials, who suspended all reclassifications and ordered the audit.

The withdrawal of documents was governed in part by secret agreements the National Archives signed with the C.I.A., in 2001, and the Air Force, in 2002, before Mr. Weinstein's tenure. Mr. Weinstein said Wednesday that such agreements were improper and should never have been signed.

Reaction to the audit and the planned overhaul of declassification from the affected government agencies, as well as from historians who had complained about the reclassification, was generally positive.

Mr. Aid, the historian who first uncovered the reclassifications, said he found the audit professional and its results "shocking."

"The various reclassification programs were, in my opinion, a massive waste of time and the taxpayers' money in a time of war, and did not enhance or improve U.S. national security at all," Mr. Aid said.

An Air Force spokeswoman, First Lt. Christy A. Stravolo, said: "This audit was a good thing. In the long run, it will improve the consistency of declassification processes across the board."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: National Archives Says Records Were Wrongly Classified. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe